It's Beginning to Taste a Lot Like Christmas

Ask our kids what they got for Hanukkah and Christmas last year (yes, we celebrate both) and there will be a long pause and, as our older daughter Phoebe might put it, a look of deep confuzzlement. And then: “I think I got…uh…a Nike shirt? Or was that my birthday? I can’t remember.” All that prep work and subterfuge, all the list-compiling and agonizing over equitable distribution of loot, and as soon as that last present is disrobed, the caravan moves on.

Ask our kids what they ate for Christmas dinner last year, on the other hand, and they will tell you precisely, right down to the chopped pecans in the roasted carrots. This is not because they’re little food fetishists; it’s because their grandmother, known to them as Hubba (long story), has cooked the exact same thing the exact same way for as long as we can remember.

Introduce a new dish? Why bother? Hubba’s menu, more than anything, is what our kids really love about the holidays. As Abby, our 10-year-old, says, “It’s warm, and it’s tradition.”

Tradition is the key word here. And the kids aren’t the only ones who embrace it. We love the holidays—at least in theory—but there is so much chaos embedded in them, so much scrambling around, that there’s something comforting about sitting down at the end of it all with your family and eating the thing you’ve been eating since Emilio Estevez was a movie star. On the buffet, there is a salad with watercress, blue cheese, pears, and pine nuts; curried carrots with pecans and chives; a massive bowl of buttery mashed potatoes; and, for the centerpiece, a beef tenderloin with Port-cranberry sauce, which looks super-luxe and damned impressive—and when you’re feeding this many mouths, probably costs as much as we’d spend on dinner in a week.

As people who care a lot about food, it does cross our minds that maybe we should mix it up once in a while and push for change—add some pomegranate molasses to the dressing, swap the tenderloin for a Bo Ssäm recipe, or attempt a homemade bûche de Noël. But then we remember: “Mixing it up” is what we spend the rest of the year doing. Tradition—not breaking it—is what makes this meal special, not just for the kids, but for all of us.